
The main product? A highly potent opioid painkiller called Subsys, a prescription version of fentanyl. In an investigative feature headlined “The Pain Hustlers”, Hughes uncovered the corrupt story of Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company that employed nefarious racketeering tactics with prescription drugs. While the character of Liza is fictional, the plot of the film is heavily drawn from real-life events, first reported by the New York Times journalist Evan Hughes in 2018 and later turned into a book, called The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup. Will Liza’s ethics and morals ever kick in, or is she simply in it to make cold, hard cash at any cost? Is it based on a true story? She gets involved in business with a pharma sales rep, Pete Brenner (Evans) – but his failing start-up soon becomes involved in “a dangerous racketeering scheme” that destroys lives. All The Mattel Toy Movies Currently Green Litīlunt stars as Liza Drake, a “blue-collar single mum” who loses her job, which puts her in a desperate situation.However, a question mark remains over whether parents will still want to read her stories to their children.įor The Telegraph’s Alice Vincent, the answer is simple: Rowling’s “joyous legacy may be sullied, but the magic of Harry Potter will endure”.

With an estimated net worth of £795m, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, Rowling should be able to withstand a drop in income.
#Harry potter author series#
“Subsequent questions have been raised about how the third planned film will perform, let alone the rest of the five-film series that had previously been mooted,” wrote the academics.Īnd ticket sales at Harry Potter theme parks and for the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child theatre production have also dropped, they added. The first Fantastic Beasts film performed solidly, grossing $814m (£653m) worldwide, but the sequel made just $654m (£524m) - the worst box-office take of all the movies set in the Harry Potter universe. There is no evidence to suggest that the row has damaged Rowling’s book sales so far.īut according to Variety magazine, Rowling’s tweets on trans issues make the future of the Fantastic Beasts spin-off film series “as precarious as the Defence Against the Dark Arts teaching position at Hogwarts”.Įven before the controversy erupted, the movies were in danger owing to waning box-office receipts, according to an article published on The Conversation in March by marketing experts from Australian universities. Has the controversy harmed Rowling’s sales? ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– For a round-up of the most important stories from around the world - and a concise, refreshing and balanced take on the week’s news agenda - try The Week magazine. We suspended disbelief in the dragons and headless ghosts and Horcruxes, but the message simmering at the bottom of the caldron was unifying because it was love.” took on the systemic oppression of minorities - the racism against Mudbloods - and pioneered tolerance, regardless of where you were born and who your parents are. can take the financial hit), but the foundations of the world she built for us suddenly feel unsteady,” says Smith, who adds that “at its heart, Potter is a saga of equality”. “It’s not the loss of readers, nor commerce (J.K. Gender doesn’t reduce so easily to the binary Rowling raised an era’s worth of children on,” she continues.įor Vogue writer Raven Smith, the row has triggered nothing short of the “erosion of the Harry Potter franchise”. “They’ve discovered that there aren’t only Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws and Slytherins that life is complicated in all sorts of ways, and not so conducive to archetyping.


Rowling defends woman sacked over trans tweetsĪs her readers have grown older, they have discovered that the real world is more nuanced than the wizarding world built by Rowling, argues Roberts. Rowling’s transgenderism tweets Row as J.K. Rowling reveals past sexual assault in essay defending her trans views Why everyone’s talking about J.K.
